Just came across this on the net. Kind of feel numb and depressed! Can't really put it in words.

http://www.morningstarboysranch.org/

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sections/morningstar/

Check out the links.

It's always sad to hear about this kind of treatment of children. I think that in this day and age, we could expect this sort of abuse to happen, and that we would take precautions so that the chances of it ever happening would be the exception rather than the rule.

To have 18 year old perpetrators in the general population of a place like this, would be downright dangerous. And to allow kids to be removed from the grounds with adults who have not been checked out, is only asking for trouble.

This case reminds me of what's going on with the Princeton Boy Choir in New Jersey. According to reports there, childhood sexual abuse has ocurred for decades.

Praying for all of the boys who have found, and find, themselves in dangerous situations like these.

David

I wonder how many more kids have to be driven into running away or suicide before somebody gets the point.

I remember the "Father Joe" type from junior high school, where I had a shop teacher and a gym/health teacher like that. One paddled me with a board with holes drilled in it (so it would hurt more) and then beat me over the back with it when I fell on the floor and curled up in a ball, and the other picked me up (yes, I was that little) and threw me over a table into a stack of chairs. Why? The first one just said "It's your turn today", and the second didn't say what I had done, just "You guys piss me off". Both these teachers were also into sneering at and humiliating boys, and we got slapped and kicked on a more or less regular basis.

7th grade was the worst for this. I used to think it was just the abuse that made me consider suicide, but maybe this had something to do with it as well. Don't remember.

In the early 1960s there was no one to talk to about ANY of this. The sexual abuse was impossible to discuss, and a boy didn't tell his parents about physical beatings because he thought maybe he really did something wrong.

I wonder how young survivors feel about this today. I hope they will tell us.

Take care,
Larry

Sorry to hear about your experiences Larry.

I wasn't abused by clergy, but I have a strong reaction to the church-especially the Catholic Church! Ironically, I work for a Catholic agency and everyday I question any association with the church. My stomach starts to knot up just thinking about it.

Vernon

Vernon,

Thanks for your post, which got me thinking about this again.

We hear a lot about the Catholic Church and abuse these days, and this boys' ranch is run by a Catholic priest. So again...

But I kind of think that the problem isn't this or that church, but any system where the authority of leaders over ordinary people is absolute, or if not absolute, so close to it in real terms as to give that leader a position of unaccountability. Where leaders are revered and accepted as paragons of virtue, it also becomes a real problem to question them even if the evidence is piling up.

This "Father Joe", for example, was giving kids pretty fierce beatings, even by standards of the 60s. There were reports about it, but nothing was done. Boys were running away, and that one kid shot and killed himself as soon as the police showed up to take him back. But nothing was done. Why? Because Father Joe wasn't accountable, he was "revered". That's the word that appears over and over again in the newspaper stories that the link leads to.

But we had the same thing in Boy Scouts, where I was abused. As Cub Scouts we knew that soon we would be moving up with the "big boys" led by Dads doing really cool things out in the woods, and not sitting around with our mothers playing games in the kitchen. We would be following "Akela", a kind of mythic Indian guide figure, and all the adult leaders were helpers of Akela.

That didn't exactly help me to resist my abuser when he came on to me (not that I would have had that option anyway), and after my Scoutmaster discovered what was going on he simply threw the guy out of Scouts. There was no retribution; the whole thing just "went away". Why? I guess because the Scout troop was sponsored by our church (Presbyterian, not Catholic). If a scandal had broken out, the church probably would have dumped the troop. My abuser just happened to an elder in the church as well. So again, coverup.

My take on this is that the problem is how authority works in setups like this. Something's clearly wrong when a 15 yo boy shoots himself dead rather than go back to a boys' ranch, and meanwhile the head of the place years later is still the "revered" (= unaccountable) Father Joe.

I'm of course reacting to whatever is provided in the link above. I guess we don't have any way of knowing if this is the whole story.

Take care,
Larry

My greatest hope is that institutions and boarding schools have changed from the horror factories they were not so many years ago.
The boarding school I went to reminds me of the Morning Star Ranch with it's culture of violence and abuse.

Dave

It's sort of easier to talk about cos we have the web, and have a site like this. Makes it a little bit easier. There's also like "online" journals you can have to write about whatever you want, you don't even have to say who you are or anything like that you can just write. Technology has sort of made it easier, we have messenging things like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.

Its hard because its like sex is all anyone talks about at school, its all thats on their mind and its all that is on tv and in the movies. I dunno if it was like way back when, I dunno what its gonna be like in the future.

Nyjah,

Yes, it was like that way back in the 60s. My friends and I talked about sex all the time, and there was a lot of comparing, chattering and gossiping, and maneuvering to be cool about it. TV and films were not so full of it as they are now, though, and you guys now also have almost unlimited access to sexual images through the internet.

I think this is always very difficult for a boy. This is his time to discover his sexuality and develop his feelings and ideas about it, but at the same time he feels that in order to fit in with his friends he has to measure up to some impossible standard. But that "standard" is almost all fantasy and empty talk, Nyjah, and no boy can measure up to it. Almost any boy any time will feel that he is somehow "lagging behind" in some way: not big enough, not experienced enough, not attractive enough, not cool enough, whatever. The really down side of this appears when the gap among the various kids gives some the power to exert control over others and they feel they have the right to use this power - bullying, abuse, etc.

I'm glad you have ways to talk and still feel safe and see how things really are. Perhaps as more kids get more genuine information and support we will see things improve in the kinds of areas Vernon and Dave and I posted about here. Every boy needs to feel confident about himself and know that he can be true to himself and his values, watch out for his friends, and let the loudmouths "talk to the hand". He needs to know that no one has the right to hurt him in any way, and if this happens, there are safe ways to get help.

Take care,
Larry